This morning our local paper had a headline “City bans sale of synthetic kratom” that set my wife and me back on our heels: what the hell was “kratom”? A quick googling took me to the Wiktionary page, which explained that it was:
1. A tree, Mitragyna speciosa, endemic to Southeast Asia.
2. The dried leaves of this tree, used in traditional medicine or recreationally for their stimulant and analgesic effects.
The second definition made pretty clear why it was subject to bans, and the etymology was interesting: “Borrowed from Thai กระท่อม (grà-tɔ̂m),” which itself is:
Borrowed from Pre-Angkorian Old Khmer កទម្វ (kadamva), កទំ (kadaṃ), from Sanskrit कदम्ब (kadamba), कदम्बक (kadambaka). Cognate with Khmer ក្ទម្ព (ktɔɔm), Lao ກະທ່ອມ (ka thǭm), Pali kadamba.
My uninformed guess is that the -r- in Thai is a hypercorrection, since spoken Thai tends to reduce etymological /kr/ to /k/. In any case, I was happy with all of that, but bothered by the pronunciation, which is given as [ˈkɹeɪ̯təm] (like “crate ’em”). That sounds like a parody of dumb anglicization to me, the way we used to call the baseball player Pedro Ramos “PEE-droh RAY-mohs.” Obviously if people say it that way, it’s a real pronunciation, but surely it’s not the only one? So I investigated further, and found that though it’s not in AHD, the OED added the word in 2023:
A tropical evergreen tree native to Southeast Asia, Mitragyna speciosa (family Rubiaceae), having large glossy ovate leaves and clusters of globular yellow flowers. Also (as a mass noun): the dried leaves of this tree or a preparation made from them, which is ingested or chewed as a stimulant. […]
The use of kratom as a recreational drug is illegal or controlled in many countries. It is also used medicinally, esp. to relieve pain or manage opioid withdrawal.
1926 ‘Kratom’ leaves from Mitrogyne speciosa are widely used for chewing purposes in Peninsular Siam and to a certain extent in Bangkok.
Record (Siam Ministry Commerce) January 155/2 […]
And it gives multiple pronunciations: British English /ˈkreɪtəm/ KRAY-tuhm, /ˈkratəm/ KRAT-uhm; U.S. English /ˈkreɪdəm/ KRAY-duhm, /ˈkrædəm/ KRAD-uhm. But I don’t like the secondary ones much better — what I want to say is /ˈkrɑdəm/ KRAHD-uhm, which seems to me the natural way to say a Thai loan in English. Does nobody really say it that way? If you know and use this word, how do you say it? (Incidentally, I looked up กระท่อม in Mary Haas’s Thai-English dictionary and discovered she doesn’t have this sense, only ‘hut, cottage.’)
I somehow get kratom muddled up with “kretek,” an alternative label for the clove-infused cigarettes that are now illegal in the U.S. but which some of us used to occasionally smoke in our reckless youths. That word however is from Bahasa Indonesia, which apparently prefers the spelling “keretek.” WIktionary claims the Indonesian word is onomatopoeic (perhaps imitating the vaguely crackling sound the thingie might make as you smoke it?) and has no deeper etymology.
I’ve seen the word and knew more or less what it was. In fact, there’s a supplier near me, conveniently located in Portland, ME.
But I always think it looks Russian, or pretend Russian, like a lethal nerve gas devised by SMERSH.
It ought to be manufactured in the highly classified Siberian military-industrial town of Kratomsk.
Cognate with Khmer ក្ទម្ព (ktɔɔm), Lao ກະທ່ອມ (ka thǭm), Pali kadamba.
My uninformed guess is that the -r- in Thai is a hypercorrection
Like กระเพา kra-phao for กะเพรา ka-phrao ‘holy basil’ (as in pad kra pao on Thai menus in the US). I assume that ka-phrao is original since the Khmer is ម្រះព្រៅ mrĕah prŏu.
The relation of kr- in Thai and k(h)- in Khmer is also seen in Thai กระเทียม kra-thiam ‘garlic’ beside Khmer ខ្ទឹម khtœ̆m. It will be easy to find other examples. I have always assumed that this prefix kra-, ka- common in Thai plants names originated in Khmer but I have nothing to back that up. There is a paper on it here (Leela Bilmes (1998) ‘The /ka-/ and /kra-/ prefixes in Thai.’ Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 21/2). See especially page 81. I’d like to consult Uraisi Varasarin (1984) Les Éléments khmers dans la formation de la langue siamoise on this question, but I am on holiday now, away from any libraries, and I haven’t found this work digitized.
Maybe someone else can dig up a good paper on the topic.
Fascinating, thanks for that!
i’ve mainy heard it pronounced roughly /krejtom/, the first syllable lightly stressed, but with less differential than usual for that pattern. i’m pretty sure that every version i’ve heard is a spelling pronunciation at heart.
and i’ve never run into “kretek” – with my teenaged crew it was always “bidis” or “djarum” (from a common filtered brand), if not just “cloves”.
We have noted before how the default vowel is TRAP in BrE and PALM in AmE for sounding letter a in loanwords from most any language. Which explains /ˈkratəm/ but not /ˈkrædəm/.
@rozele: I too would have used “clove” as the default name for the item, and for alternatives might potentially have thought of bidi or djarum before kretek if not primed by “kratom.” Although it’s been a long time and maybe “kretek” figured more prominently in the news articles from a dozen or fifteen years ago about the controversy resulting from the decision of our first Indonesian-American president to exclude them from the U.S. market in violation of our treaty obligations to Indonesia.. FWIW wikipedia has “beedi” as the standard spelling and “bidi” as a variant, which is odd because “bidi” looks more properly foreign whereas “beedi” has the archaic vibe of e.g. “Hindoo.”
It’s not in the OED under either spelling (but kretek is there, first citation 1958: “These were the famous kretek cigarettes, in which the tobacco is mixed with cloves; their crackling gives the cigarettes their name,” H. Forster, Flowering Lotus i. 6).
Varasarin is in Google Books, but appears to only have the ‘hutte, cabane’ sense.
I wasn’t familiar with kratom, but remember finding it awkward to get used to the usual English pronunciation of kapok as /ˈkeɪpɒk/ KAY-pock. I kept wanting to call it /ˈkɑːpɒk/ KAH-pock (or /ˈkæpɒk/ KAP-ock I guess in British English) to be closer to the original Malay pronunciation.
I totally understand the reaction, since it’s the same as mine, but in that case I was familiar with the word from childhood and so the pronunciation seems normal. I guess I’ll use that as a parallel to get myself to feel comfortable with /ˈkreɪdəm/ KRAY-duhm!
Google’s “AI Overview” will fairly confidently assert that there is no evidence of “kapok restaurant east bay 1970s.” Fortunately, though, SAIL’s YUMYUM (hackers were fond of heading up there) and FBI’s tracking of AAPA (it ran an ad in the first issue of their newletter) confirm that it isn’t that human memory has failed.
“Beedi” gives me the same impression of inconsistent romanization that “Count Dooku” does.
Old Khmer កទម្វ (kadamva), កទំ (kadaṃ), from Sanskrit कदम्ब (kadamba)
The referent of Sanskrit kadamba- is usually said to be Neolamarckia cadamba (syn. Nauclea cadamba), but it has been proposed (as here and here) that it is sometimes used to designate Mitragyna parvifolia (often mistakenly given as Mitragyna parviflora?), a common South Asian tree of the same genus as kratom (M. speciosa). Both Neolamarckia and Mitragyna bear fragrant globular flower heads. The reflexes of the Sanskrit word in modern Indo-Aryan languages sometimes designate M. parvifolia (as for instance in Bengali কেলি কদম keli kodom, literally ‘disporting kadam’, since Krishna played with the gopis underneath this tree and threw their clothes out of their reach onto it while they were bathing). The Sanskrit name kadamba- is usually said to be of Dravidian origin (see the cognate set in Burrow’s comparative dictionary here).
Among several other names for M. speciosa, Malay has کتوم kĕtum, which looks like it may have been mediated by a Thai form without the -r-.
What did that poor tree do to get Lamarck in its name? And Neo (from the Matrix?) too. I’m tagging this as fake news.
Neolamarckia has a Wikipedia article which has a link to the paper. The type specimen of the type species was in the Lamarck herbarium and had been mislabeled so generations had thought it was part of the type of another species in another genus; it needed a new name. The Wikipedia article on Lamarck confirms he was a botanist, too (which I hadn’t known).
Yeah, I had mostly only heard the slander too.